The Problem of Palestinian Culture

Progressives defend Hamas's atrocities by claiming life in Gaza is so bad it would turn anyone into a terrorist. That's false, but what's the truth?

Gaza is the world’s largest open-air prison, where people are crowded in smothering slums and the economy is so crippled by blockade and bombardment that inhabitants live like dogs, where life is brutish and short and what few years people can steal are stamped by the trauma of a genocidal and illegal occupation, where everyone is forced to endure such abuse as would radicalize even the best of us to violence.

This is the argument I keep hearing by those who wish to justify the atrocities Hamas carried out on October 7. Progressives have even characterized the slaughter of 1,400 innocent people, the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, as a “prison break.”

There are several parts to this argument. Gaza is incredibly dense, which is why there are so many civilian casualties when Israel retaliates. Gaza is unbelievably poor, which is why Gazans are so desperate in their struggle. Gazans lack education, which is why they resort to extremist violence. Gazans are being killed at ghastly rates, which is why their struggle is not a terrorist campaign so much as a resistance movement.

A Theory of Crime

No one would deny that social determinants play a role in human behavior. As much was proven in the 1920s and 1930s by the Chicago School, a group of sociologists at the University of Chicago that attempted to make sociology objectively more scientific by applying rigorous empirical research methods to the study of urban social phenomena.

Two of the Chicago School’s most prominent members, Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay, studied crime in neighborhoods that were experiencing economic transitions. They found that criminal behavior was correlated with poverty, housing insecurity, unemployment, lack of education, and the breakdown of the family unit. This was true regardless of the ethnic makeup of the neighborhood. In other words, crime was not higher in black neighborhoods, it was higher in poor neighborhoods and, for historical reasons such as slavery and redlining, poorer neighborhoods tended to be black.

This dispelled the belief, common at the time, that crime rates were higher within black communities because there was something wrong with black people themselves, either with their genetics or their culture. Instead, Shaw and McKay had found, crime was an emergent property of a dysregulated social system. If poverty, unemployment, and low education rates spiked in white communities, you could expect to see the same results.

Shaw and McKay called this the social disorganization theory, and its emphasis on community context and systemic inequality proved foundational in the fields of criminology and urban sociology. The theory specifically played a major role in critical criminology. Remember, in academic contexts, the word “critical” does not simply mean critical thinking or analysis, but usually refers specifically to Marxist analysis, as in the Marxist schools of critical theory, critical legal studies, and critical race theory.

Critical criminology began when the Dutch criminologist Willem Monger—whose older brother Andries, by the way, was an art dealer and close friends with Theo and Vincent van Gogh—published his 1916 work Criminology and Economic Conditions. This was the great early work of Marxist criminology, in which Monger applied Marxist theories of capitalism to the study of crime. Basically, he believed capitalism caused crime. Specifically, he believed capitalism caused poverty, which then caused crime.

Fast forward a decade and Shaw and McKay plugged in the quantitative data Monger had lacked. The results seemed conclusive and liberals were happy not to look too closely, given that the theory was overly deterministic, as it offered a tidy explanation for black crime rates that was politically more palatable than the alternative.

A version of social disorganization theory is also shared by critical legal theorists, who apply the same critical lens to the study of law. Now, take that and apply it exclusively to race and you have critical race theory (CRT), beginning with the work of people such as Derrick Bell, who began his career handling desegregation cases for the NAACP’s legal arm but later became so jaded that he ended up believing America was inherently racist and always would be, an idea he called “racial realism,” and that the legal system was inherently racist, and that whites are inherently selfish and will only help blacks if they can get something out of it, an idea he called “interest convergence.”

This Marxist analysis is at the heart of the arguments we hear from Western academics and journalists who cheer for Hamas. They are not unaware of Hamas’s atrocities. They believe, just as they would if we were talking about black crime rates in the United States, that the problem is fundamentally one of subjugation to the total exclusion of determination. Gazan support for violence is to be entirely explained by historical oppression and various forms of systemic racism that have led to poverty, housing insecurity, unemployment, lack of education, and so on.

In woke ideology, one can sometimes ascribe acts of violence to individual ethnic minority members, but generally this is dismissed as ignoring the greater context. Even when black youths attack or kill elderly Asians, for instance, we are told this is not their fault nor even the fault of their culture, but rather this is the fault of white people. The idea here is that whites are racist against Asians and blacks, who have no agency of their own and have unthinkingly adopted that racism.

But what is considered even more problematic than attributing blame to the murderer is attributing blame to the murderer’s culture. An individual can be written off, or an individual legal finding can be dismissed as unjust, but a cultural problem has the potential to implicate every member of a group. For this reason, blaming a person’s culture is generally considered racist.

This is strange because social disorganization theory, as well as the very concept of systemic racism that is sometimes used to exonerate black youths who murder Asian grandmothers, depends on the fact that there are influences on individual actions that go beyond personal decision-making to the realm of environmental factors.

Again, no one would deny social determinants play a role in human behavior. And what greater social determinants can there be for social creatures such as ourselves than the social and cultural environments in which live? What greater impact is there on our psychology than our beliefs, values, habits, and norms?

We already know how to do the moral math on this. If a child is molested by a guardian and grows up to molest a child, we of course recognize that their victimization is what led them to become a predator, and that tragically, this kind of abuse is often cyclical. But when the victim becomes the predator, we do not shrug and blame the predator’s abuser. Instead, we say that once the victim decides to abuse a child, they cross a line and have now become just as bad as the person who abused them. This is the correct approach to all forms of cyclical harm.

Neither do we dismiss the culpability of slave owners in the American South on the basis of their poverty or profound ignorance, even though we realize their ignorance clearly played a role in what they did and that social disorganization theory was obviously at play. Nevertheless, we lay blame at the feet of the slavers.

Both are true at the same time. Most events have a proximal and a distal cause. If I want to eat pizza, the proximal cause might be that I haven’t had lunch and pizza is one of my favorite foods, while the distal cause is that my evolutionary biology has determined that I require carbohydrate-rich foods as a source of energy. Both these reasons are happening at the same time. Both are equally true.

Similarly, a black youth who kills an Asian woman may have been influenced by a cultural milieu of anti-Asian racism that was overwhelmingly established by white people, yet culture did not force the murderer to pull the trigger or swing the bat.

This is how Marxists academics and journalists come to view the attack by Hamas as justified violence. Yes, part of the story here is that Israel is US-aligned and wrongly viewed as a white colonizer while Palestinians are US rivals who are viewed as brown indigenous people. But the reason that Palestinian opposition to the United States results in it being framed it as a heroic underdog whereas Nazi opposition to the United States does not isn’t, as we now know, because Nazis committed evil acts of cruelty. If any of us believed this, we were disabused of that notion in recent weeks. Rather, it is because this is fundamentally still a left-right political battleground.

It doesn’t make sense to think of Israeli politics in terms of the American left and right, and perhaps even less sense to think of it in terms of Nazism versus Communism, but there you have it.

How a Photo Made Hamas Cool

How exactly are Gazans communist? They’re not, but it’s not hard to see how some people came to this conclusion. The Palestinian nationalist movement entered the Western imagination in the 1960s with the founding of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964, along with a series of terrorist attacks by the Marxist-Leninist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The PFLP carried out a series of airline hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s, which terrified air travelers worldwide, captured public attention, and made the Palestinian cause famous, for better or for worse.

This included the hijacking of El Al Flight 426 from Rome in 1968, the shooting aboard El Al Flight 253 in Athens in 1968, the attack on El Al Flight 432 in Zurich in 1969, and the hijacking in 1969 of TWA Flight 840 from Los Angeles.

That last one is especially important because it was carried out by a PFLP cell led by a Palestinian woman named Leila Khaled, who would become the PFLP’s most famous member. In fact, Khaled became the female counterpart to Che Guevara. She was a communist, she was an armed rebel, and most importantly, she had a cool brand.

This brand rests on a single photograph of Khaled, one so famous you’ve probably seen it before even if you don’t recognize her name. It’s an image of her holding an AK-47 with a Palestinian keffiyeh (scarf) covering her head. It is not an exaggeration to say this image is as iconic as the college dorm room poster of Che in his beret.

The image checked a number of leftist boxes. Khaled was a woman, so it had feminist appeal, she was holding a gun, so you know she was a true Leninist willing to kill or be killed for the cause, she was not white, she was not Western, she was not Christian, and she was fighting against a far more powerful foe, so she was an underdog.

Never mind that this has little to do with Hamas. Or that the central ideology of Hamas is not communism, or even global jihadism, but antisemitism. Despite this, for Americans, the Palestinian cause became wedded to the Leninist struggle thanks to the PFLP’s terrorist hijackings and a really cool photo of Leila Khaled.

This is why Hamas receives support from hipster Leninists, tankie journalists, Black Lives Matter activists, woke ideologues, and Democratic Socialists. For them, Hamas does not trace back to Muhammad, but to Vladimir Lenin.

Does Life in Gaza Justify Death in Israel?

That explains why Palestine is such an irrational obsession for Western “critical” thinkers. They are bending the half-truth of Khaled’s Leninist liberation struggle to shoehorn it into the current genocidal intifada or kampf (both mean ‘struggle’). But to what extent are they right to apply social disorganization theory to Gaza? That is, to what extent do the dire conditions in Gaza contribute to Hamas’s atrocities?

It is true that Gaza is relatively dense, but only about as dense as London, and far from one of the densest places in the world. Reports say the Gaza Strip contains 15,000 to 21,000 people per square mile, which makes it roughly equivalent to West Hollywood or Paterson, New Jersey. New York City is twice as dense as Gaza.

I lived in Seoul for six years, where there are 43,000 people per square mile, and while rush-hour subways are best avoided, the city is otherwise quite comfortable in terms of density. I walked 40 minutes to the newsroom every day through the heart of downtown, past Namdaemun and Seoul Plaza, and most mornings the streets were relaxingly quiet.

My old home city of Kathmandu, Nepal, has about 76,000 people per square mile and is the sixth-densest city in the world. There, you almost never find a major road without people, public transit is always crowded, and markets are a mess. When I needed a bit of peace, I used to climb the hill to the Swayambhu temple complex and walk around.

Turning back to Israel, the densest city in the region is actually the Israeli city of Bnei Brak, just east of Tel Aviv, which ranks fifth worldwide with a density of 80,000 people per square mile. When I lived in Tel Aviv, I visited Bnei Brak, which is home to a large Haredi community and is one of the poorest cities in Israel. This is a place where people will spit on young girls who ride the bus home from school if they are not dressed properly, and the buildings are so crowded parts of the city reminded me of a Brazilian favela. Yet even Bnei Brak has a charming placidity at times.

The densest city in the world is Manila, with 112,000 people per square mile. The city’s Santa Ana district has 310,000 people per square mile, which seems impossible to fathom. People live crammed together, the streets are teeming, the markets pulse with traffic, and there is rarely a moment of silence to be stolen. You might imagine throngs of people pressed shoulder to shoulder on every sidewalk and crushed into every cafe, but it’s not actually like that. In fact, many parts of Santa Ana are quite peaceful.

In other words, even with a population density that is 15 or 20 times worse than in Gaza, a city can be quite livable. Cities like Seoul, Kathmandu and even Manila are actually quite wonderful places. They do not produce generation after generation of terrorists. Meanwhile, no Gazan city makes the top 100 list in terms of density.

Gaza’s density does make targeted attacks difficult, but Gaza is not so dense as to result in the kind of disproportionality we see when Israel conducts airstrikes. Rather, the primary cause of civilian deaths during Israeli retaliatory strikes is Hamas. In his recent essay, “Hamas’s Strategy of Human Sacrifice,” Douglas Feith, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, explains:

While some of Hamas’s most brutal tactics, like systematic rape and beheading captives, are long-practiced atrocities for which the armies of Stalin, Hitler, and Genghis Khan are infamous, it is unprecedented for a party to adopt a war strategy to maximize civilian deaths on its own side. This is so strange and evil that it should appall any decent person. Contrary to conventional commentary, this is not a human shield strategy. It’s a human sacrifice strategy.

Since its birth in 1987, Hamas has declared its aim to destroy Israel. Its strategy is asymmetric—that is, because Hamas is smaller and weaker than the Israeli army, it relies on a strategy designed to undermine Israel politically. In hopes (presumably) that it can induce Saudi leaders to drop their plans to normalize relations with Israel, Hamas launched this war with two goals. First, to provoke uprisings among Arabs and Muslims, both within and outside Israel. Second, to cause the rest of the world to view Israel with disgust and hatred. […]

Defense officials in numerous countries, for operational reasons and to comply with international laws of war, take pains to locate their military assets away from their civilians and to maximize protection for the latter. Hamas officials do the opposite. As United Nations officials and others have disapprovingly noted, Hamas stores ammunition in schools, puts missile launchers adjacent to mosques, sets up command centers in hospitals, and generally bases its operations in densely populated civilian neighborhoods.

This is not simply a human-shield strategy, where the aim is to deter an attack by using innocent lives as a barrier. Hamas is doing something far more insidious: it’s ensuring the mass death of Palestinians. Here is Hamas official Ali Baraka summing up the difference between the two worldviews: “The Israelis are known to love life. We, on the other hand, sacrifice ourselves. We consider our dead to be martyrs.”

This is why, when Israel issued a warning last week for Palestinians to evacuate northern Gaza so that it could target Hamas facilities without killing innocent people, Hamas told Gazans to stay put.

This is primarily why Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes have killed disproportionately more Palestinians, currently more than 5,000 including about 2,000 children.

Nor is Gaza among the poorest regions in the world. World Bank data for 2022 indicates the Palestinian territories have a higher per capita GDP than more than one-third of the world’s countries including India, Nigeria, Nepal, and Rwanda.

The Palestinians of the West Bank are less extreme and their government, run by Fatah, is more willing to negotiate peace. The government of Gaza, run by Hamas, is dead-set on killing all the world’s Jews. As a result, Gaza is subject to greater restrictions and has experienced more retaliatory military campaigns by Israel, and therefore has a significantly weaker economy than the West Bank.

Yet in 2022, the GDP per capita in Gaza was estimated at $1,257, which would make Gazans wealthier than two or three dozen other countries in the world. In addition, the international community has sent billions of dollars in aid to the Gaza Strip. From 1994 to 2020, Palestinians received over $40 billion. That averages out to about $1.5 billion per year. From 2014 to 2020, the UN sent $4.5 billion to Gaza, including $600 million in 2020 alone. The problem is, this aid ends up in the hands of Hamas.

Then there’s life expectancy, except Gazans are actually doing better than the global average. The average age of death for women worldwide is 73.9 years old, whereas Gazan women have a life expectancy of 74.6 years.

But what about all the bombing? Surely that would turn any people violent. Well, consider that the most bombed place on Earth was probably Vietnam in the 1960s. American aircraft dropped over 5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam. It was the largest bombing of any country in history. In fact, we dropped more than twice the tonnage of bombs on Vietnam than we did during all of World War II. So where were the decades and decades of Vietnamese terrorism?

Perhaps it’s not a matter of tonnage so much as death. Vietnam is full of fields and outside the urban centers, people are fairly spread out. By contrast, Gazans live on top of each other and Israeli airstrikes over the years have probably killed so many people that Gazans have been overwhelmed by death. Okay, let’s look at that.

The bombing of London during World War II killed 43,000 people. The bombing of Berlin killed 50,000. The atomic bombs killed 80,000 in Nagasaki and up to 126,000 in Hiroshima. The bombing of Tokyo killed up to 200,000.

None of these places produce generation after generation of genocidal terrorists. Yet the total number of occupation and conflict-related fatalities over the past 15 years in Gaza, from January 2008 to the end of September this year, has been 5,360.

Do not misunderstand. Conditions in Gaza are horrendous. Only 10% of Gazans have access to clean water. Only a handful of countries, such as the Central African Republic, are worse off in that regard. Unemployment in Gaza reached 45% in 2022 (compared to 13% in the West Bank). In 2020, Ali al-Hayek, head of the Palestinian Businessmen's Association in Gaza, said:

Gaza’s economy has completely collapsed, especially amid the latest escalation, where closing the Kerem Shalom cargo crossing and not allowing the entry of fuel and industrial materials led to an economic catastrophe. The private sector in Gaza is almost dead; we’re facing a serious collapse that is reflected in social issues . . . Economic activity has completely stopped in Gaza.

Things are bad in Gaza. But the idea that Gazans are genocidal because they live in dense, impoverished, unlivable circumstances surrounded by death makes no sense because there are many places far worse, yet which do not produce the same results.

So even if we accept the social disorganization theory here, which I do, and that distal causes influence Gazans, which I do, there is still a missing piece that drives Gazans to violence but that other places with far worse conditions lack. That piece is culture.

Kampf Revolution

Even if Israel were to eliminate Hamas without a single civilian death—in a terrain less favorable than Fallujah, no less—that wouldn’t entirely solve the problem. It is immoral to punish Gazans as a whole for the evil perpetrated by Hamas, but they and their culture are nevertheless partly responsible.

Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian legislative election with 44% of the vote—then forcibly took power when Fatah, which won 41%, tried to remove them in the Battle of Gaza. In those elections, Hamas fielded candidates who refused to negotiate with Israel because they believe Israel should not exist and all Jews should be killed.

Sentiment has changed among Gazans since then, but not entirely for the better. According to Washington Institute polling conducted in July, 50% of Gazans said Hamas should stop calling for Israel’s destruction, 62% said they supported maintaining a ceasefire with Israel and 70% said they support the Palestinian Authority taking over Gaza. In addition, Hamas is now the least popular political party in Gaza.

On the other hand, Hamas still enjoys 58% support while the most popular party with 74% support is Lion’s Den. This group gained popularity because it has perpetrated a series of attacks in recent years while Hamas, which has been pretending to govern while secretly planning this week’s pogrom, lost popularity among Gazans who did not know what Hamas was hatching and began to believe the group had gone soft.

So you see, Hamas is only the immediate problem. The underlying problem lies with Gazans, and this problem cuts much deeper than their hatred of Jews, though it is not unrelated to that.

In a world of brutally oppressive Islamic nations, the Palestinian territories are well-known for being among the very worst—the most racist, the most sexist, the most homophobic Muslims in the world, which puts them high in the running for the most intolerant and hateful people on Earth. Worse still, they openly embrace murder to enforce their bigotry.

A Pew Research poll conducted in 2013 found that Palestinians are one of the most homophobic people in the world. A collection of Pew polls published the same year found 84% of Palestinians support stoning women to death for adultery and 76% favor corporal punishment for stealing. In both cases, only Pakistan and Afghanistan were worse. The series also showed 66% support for executing people who leave Islam.

The Anti-Defamation League’s 2014 survey of antisemitism in the West Bank and Gaza found 64% said Jews talk too much about the Holocaust, 78% said Jews cause most of the wars in the world and 87% said people hate Jews because of the way Jews behave.

In 2016, a 19-year-old Hamas member blew himself up on a bus in Jerusalem. He lost several limbs and was rushed to a hospital—you read that right—where he eventually succumbed to his wounds days later. At least 21 others were injured, but thankfully, no one was murdered. A poll that year by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found 75% of Gazans supported the attack.

This was also the time of what Palestinains call the Habba, and what Israelis call the Knife Intifada, during which there were an average of three Palestinian stabbings per day for several months, ultimately killing 31 Israeli civilians, two US citizens, one Eritrean, five Israeli security personnel and wounding 558 people. When asked about this in the same poll, 75% of Gazans said they supported the stabbings.

I wonder what percentage of Ukrainians would support the murder of innocent Russian civilians. Or how many Jews during World War II would have supported serial stabbings of everyday Germans who had nothing to do with Nazi policies. My guess is that these numbers would both be below 10%, but I haven’t seen data on this question.

As a former university lecturer, I strongly believe education is not merely a type of job training, but can be a kind of character building and a morally edifying experience. This is not the case in Gaza, where the higher institutions are polluted with antisemitic vitriol. As a result, support for murder among Gazans was especially high among educated youth—76% of Gazans aged 18 to 22 supported the murders compared to 55% aged 50 and above, while 62% of Gazans with a bachelor’s degree supported the murders compared to 49% of illiterate Palestinians.

Why would it be the case that education makes one less tolerant? Because education has become one of the avenues of brainwashing Gazans into genocidal hatred of Jews, and this has taken place because the culture itself is so fixated on antisemitism that there is little oxygen left for anything else.

It is not just education at the higher levels that is the problem either. Gazans begin indoctrinating their people with racism from early childhood. Just watch this video of Palestinian schoolchildren describing all the depraved things they hope to do one day.

There have been many groups in the past who have suffered terrible oppression, but did not resort to genocidal racism as a result. And there are fine and noble Palestinian thinkers and poets who reject racism, murder, and rape. Imagine that.

Perhaps soon, I will write something to highlight the brilliant Palestinian minds of our generation and what they have to say about current events. But for now, let me simply point out that their voices are in the minority, and that the same Leninist culture that justifies atrocity in the minds of Gazans has slipped into our institutions as well.

This is why we now see professors and journalists celebrating the murder and rape of innocent Jewish people. This is why we see people marching in Western cities and chanting, “Intifada Revolution.” Perhaps, in the end, Lenin’s great victory was not in Russia but in America, and was not a political triumph but a psychological one.

Part of this legacy has been a kind of politically correct prohibition against noting cultural influences in behavior. Now, as we witness the Great Hamas Unmasking and shake the cobwebs from our heads, perhaps it’s time to revisit this principle.